IBM Focuses on Big Data, Cloud, Engagement in 2014

IBM’s investments in data and analytics are driving significant growth, with 40,000 service engagements to date, growing by double digits, she added. In 2013 the company’s business analytics revenue rose 9 percent—led by Global Business Services and Software. “This is already a nearly $16 billion business for us, and we have raised our expectations for it,” she said. “This is creating a market that is expected to reach $250 billion by 2015.”
Meanwhile, Rometty claimed IBM to be “the leader in enterprise cloud, a position we have enhanced through investments of $7 billion on 15 acquisitions, most notably SoftLayer in 2013. We provide the full spectrum of cloud delivery models—infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service and business process as a service. IBM’s cloud capabilities are built on 1,500 cloud patents and supported by thousands of cloud experts. Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies use IBM’s cloud capabilities.”
IBM’s cloud foundation at the infrastructure level is SoftLayer, which Rometty said is “the market’s premier public and private cloud environment, with ‘bare metal’ dedicated servers that provide unmatched compute power, deployed in real time, with hundreds of configuration options. Our public cloud processes 5.5 million client transactions every day.”
The company boasts a roster of 30,000 cloud client engagements, with customers such as Honda, Sun Life Stadium, US Open Tennis and hundreds of top online games with a user base exceeding 100 million.

“To meet growing demand for greater speed, and legal requirements for compliance and data residency, IBM is aggressively expanding its global cloud footprint," Rometty said. “We currently have 25 data centers globally, and the new $1.2 billion investment announced in January will see the opening of 15 more, in the U.S., the UK, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, and Mexico.”

In addition, at the recent IBM Pulse 2014 conference, IBM announced another $1 billion investment to launch a Platform-as-a-Service capability for developing born-on-the-cloud apps and connecting existing enterprise data and applications to the cloud.
“The impact of our cloud investments shows up clearly in our results,” Rometty said. “IBM’s cloud business grew 69 percent in 2013, delivering $4.4 billion of revenue. As we actively embrace cloud in order to deliver ‘IBM as a Service’ to our clients, we expect to see significant benefits in client experience, revenue growth and enterprise productivity.”
Finally, regarding systems engagement, Rometty said, “complementing traditional back-office systems of record, enterprises are now taking a systematic approach to engagement with all of their constituencies—customers, employees, partners, investors and citizens. Indeed, 57 percent of companies now expect to devote more than a quarter of their IT spending to these new systems of engagement by 2016, nearly twice the level of 12 months ago.”
Social business and data analytics are helping to enable systems of engagement. IBM is building modern enterprise systems of engagement and learning. The company’s social platform, Connections, has 300,000 IBM users and 200,000 communities, Rometty said. There are more than 30,000 IBMers active on Client Collaboration Hubs for the company’s top 300 accounts. In 2013, IBM achieved year-over-year growth of 69 percent in mobile, 19 percent in security and 45 percent in social business.